


Sketches

by laetificat



Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-19 12:51:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16534910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laetificat/pseuds/laetificat
Summary: A collection of brief pieces from the early days of the Van Der Linde Gang.





	Sketches

**Author's Note:**

> I have three WIPs for these boys on the go right now. this started out as an exercise to work out some headcanon stuff and turned into a meditation on the nature of Dutch.

Dutch doesn’t teach John to shoot. By the time the boy joins the gang he’s used a gun three times, once to kill a man. He knows how to shoot.

But Dutch does teach John how to shoot properly -- how to stop wincing his eyes shut when he squeezes the trigger; how to take into account wind, recoil, and the way a target might move; how to wash the blood off his hands after the fighting has been hot and close and chase it with a shot of whiskey to stop the shaking. 

*

The first time Dutch meets Arthur, Dutch is 21 - young in some eyes but old enough to understand the role he’s been given in life, and full of the world’s energy to do something with it. Arthur is 16, skinny as a rake and living with a rag-tag band of boys out in the forest. 

They meet when Arthur tries to lift Dutch’s gun out of his holster in a saloon. Dutch catches him in the act, squeezes his wrist until Arthur yells that his bones are going to break and Dutch’s revolver falls to the sandy floorboards. Once he’s given Arthur a backhand across his face and a couple of cuffs to the ear, he tells the boy to pack his things and accompany himself and Hosea back to their camp. 

After spitting blood to the floor, Arthur asks why. 

Dutch leans in real close and smiles. 

“Because you’re the first one to get it all the way out of the holster before I noticed,” he replies.

*

Dutch doesn’t try to be Arthur’s father. 

Hosea tries, in his way. He reminds Arthur to eat, to wash his face, to not talk back when his elders are telling him what to do. Instills some gentlemanly values in the half-wild boy. He teaches Arthur to read and write, using old wanted posters as primers. 

They rob a homestead and Arthur disappears. Fearing him shot and bleeding out somewhere, Hosea goes hunting for him and finds him curled up in a bedroom at the back with an illustrated collection of Jonathan Swift. It’s the first book Arthur has ever been able to read, and he keeps it with him until the covers are falling off and the pages start warping from damp.

*

Hosea doesn’t begrudge Dutch the way Arthur -- and, later, John -- looks at him. Hell, he finds himself looking at Dutch that way too, sometimes. The man has a way about him that inspires hero worship. It feels natural, the same way that enjoying the sight of a forest fire as it cuts through a valley feels natural. The raw, awesome power of a force moving at will. 

The feeling of knowing you’re safe, for as long as you can stay out of the smoke and the flames.

*

John is 12 when he joins the gang. Arthur is close to the same age that Dutch was when he himself joined and feels a sense of responsibility, though he chafes at the idea of having a kid following him around. Occasionally in those first few weeks he wonders if Dutch didn't pick the boy up on purpose, as a test of some kind.

Arthur quickly discovers he has inherited none of Dutch’s patience, and nothing of the way Dutch can make the world shrink down to the space between himself and you with a few words, weighting those words with importance and meaning. Somehow those same words feel clumsy and false in his mouth.

He finds he has little of Hosea’s simple kindness, either, and that ends up chafing at him even more than the idea of looking after John. The first time John speaks back at him he cuffs the boy so hard he splits his lip, then stalks away bristling with anger at himself and gets drunker that night than he has done for a long time.

John is quick to forgive in those days, but Arthur gives up trying to be a father to him. Later he comes to realise perhaps they are both better for it. Later still, with John's lean body held close against his own, he realises that maybe Dutch got what he wanted after all.

*

It’s not clear what it was that made Dutch want to adopt these waifs and strays into his life and that of his gang. Occasionally he tells Arthur and John stories about his own father, that great man who died for a cause that didn’t thank him, who would have lived and lived long if not forced to fight for a government that let him die in the dirt of Gettysburg, but it’s hard to tell how much of it is fact and how much fiction. 

When John asks why him out of all the other boys that hang at the edges of their world like starving dogs, Dutch says that he figures it to be fate for all of them to be together. That he just knows one day they will do something grand and change the world for the better.

*

For a while -- before John -- it’s just the three of them, more a strange little family than a true gang. Dutch, Hosea and their boy. 

Dutch pays for them to have a photograph taken in a parlour in Blackwater, one hot summer day after a particularly successful and lucrative job. He introduces Arthur to the photographer as his son and Hosea as his brother. The photographer raises his eyebrows at that but wisely doesn’t say a word. 

Arthur feels uncomfortable in the heat and in his new clothes, not used to having such fine materials against his skin. While the photographer sets up the camera, Dutch puts a heavy hand on his shoulder and leans down to him.

“Remember this day, Arthur. Remember it well. This, right here, is the man you were always meant to be.”

Arthur buys his own copy of the photo with his takings from the job.

*

Arthur never quite figures what's between Dutch and Hosea. He makes guesses, from time to time, often lubricated by drink, but the true nature of their relationship remains elusive. 

And then one spring evening, he comes back from a hunting trip a little earlier than expected and sees the two men standing close in the dusk gloom. Closer than friends might, and certainly Dutch raises his hand and touches Hosea's cheek with a telling familiarity. They remain like that for a little while, Dutch talking softly and urgently, then Hosea turns and walks away. Dutch watches him go.

Arthur sits on his horse for a moment, then wheels his mount around and makes a noisy show of arriving back in camp from a different direction entirely. 

After that he stops trying to figure out what's going on. But he never forgets that sight, of Dutch watching Hosea leave, and the strange bitter smile on his face.


End file.
